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Export Controls

Economic and trade sanctions enacted by one government against another often have detrimental effects on the free flow of digital communications and communications technologies that activists, innovators and ordinary users of technologies desperately need. EFF has a long history of fighting against those effects, especially by the US government.

Since the beginning, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has worked to ensure that individuals everywhere have access to important technologies that they need to communicate, enjoy privacy, and organize. As part of the “crypto wars,” we handled the seminal case, Bernstein v. U.S. Dept. of Justice, that, along with a sister case Junger v. Daley, resulted in rulings that written software code is speech protected by the First Amendment. In Bernstein, the court held that export control laws on encryption programs violated Bernstein’s First Amendment rights by prohibiting his constitutionally protected right to publish his software. This ruling helped spur the government to change its licensing practices so that everyone now has the right to publish, and thereby “export” most encryption software without prior permission from the government.

Today, we continue our work to ensure that U.S. takes steps necessary to free up vital communications technologies from export controls, so that companies have the information they need to apply for export licenses to controlled countries or to understand that no license is needed, while simultaneously fighting for overall clarity and reform of the labyrinthine export regulations.

Today, the the Trump Administration announced the decertification of the Iranian nuclear deal agreed by the previous administration. It's the strongest sign of many showing that the U.S. government intends to take a new and more confrontational line against Iran. But long before the decertification, tech companies were making...

Cisco custom-built the so-called “Great Firewall of China,” also known as the “Golden Shield.” This system enables the Chinese government to conduct Internet surveillance and censorship against its citizens. As if that weren’t bad enough, company documents also revealed that, as part of its marketing pitch to China and in...

“We think that trying to craft a regulatory definition that would capture offensive tools only while leaving defensive tools freely available is not possible,” Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told The Hill. “We think it’s a fool’s errand to even try.”

“We think that trying to craft a regulatory definition that would capture offensive tools only while leaving defensive tools freely available is not possible,” Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told The Hill. “We think it’s a fool’s errand to even try.”